Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1552
Some 2021 open items resolved, Hardhome, the glass in my finger, editing vol 2, the hair tray is controversial
Good morning, good morning, hello, hi, how are you, what is up. I have returned from taking Jane to school, stopping at two grocery stores, and going to the collection center. The collection center said the bin for building materials was full. I snuck something in there anyway. I am such a scofflaw.
The small piece of glass that got embedded in my finger in May or so has migrated and now it is sitting on a nerve or something so every time I even so much as tap that finger, my right middle finger, searing pain shoots up my entire arm, just absolute, horrific pain. It starts diminishing almost instantly, but it is never completely gone. It is deeply unpleasant. Luckily it does not hurt to type with it, I can tap it dead-on, just not from the side. I’ve already been to one doctor — a dermatologist — to try and get this glass out. She had no luck. And I had already made the appointment with the second doctor, my hand doctor, for next week, before this thing migrated and started getting painful. But I gotta be honest: the next week is going to suck.
Still working on my Game of Thrones re-watch and watched the Season 5 episode Hardhome last night and that might be the single best battle scene of the whole series. When their budgets had gotten big, but they had not yet started shooting everything in absolute darkness. Also the Night King was still scary. But man. What an episode. I remember there’s some Gold Road dragon battle or something later that is pretty impressive, but I feel like the Dragon battles are just less visceral in some way. Reading the books, finally. It is hard. I want to read them for all the stuff that’s different in the later part of the series — absence of Young Griff and all that — but book 1 is almost completely exactly the same as the series. And it is just so painful watching Ned be so naive. Alas. But we will get there. They’re far more readable than I thought. A nice little 30 minute wind-down before bed. Though I did dream about Walder Frey the other night. That was unfortunate.
Lotta chit-chat on the GMHHAY slack about my use-a-tray-over-the-sink-for-your-beard-shavings commentary. I will just say, 1) yes, I use a beard trimmer (classic Oster), no water, so that is a reason this can work, and 2) you can use this nice technique without being a gross-ass weirdo like me and saving all your hair shavings. The innovation and the creepiness are for two disparate aspects of this whole habit of mine.
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Listening to a sort-of post-rock-ish band called Nausia this morning. They are Swedish, I believe. They have three albums. This is their latest, Finding a Circle. It is swell. I bet this band has like six members or some shit and they are young and earnest and passionate and artistic and state-supported and have robust love lives and drink cappuccinos in Swedish cafes my god Sweden has so many beautiful people in the country it is a good thing Sweden was not further south because aside from the cold it is the best country in the world.
Working through the GMHHAY vol 2 edits, up to October 2021. I am restoring a lot that Lisa cut and it is making me feel a little bad and a little weird because I asked this person to make it tight and interesting and now I am adding all this weird shit back into it. But it is occurring to me that GMHHAY has lore at this point, and Lisa is not fully up on the lore, so things like, you know, the 2007 9-inch Old Navy Brown Bear saga or that six month period where I obsess about egg-cracking or whatever are too much a part of the history of the endeavor to really cut completely. I may be re-adding too much about Apple. I re-added a whole subplot about Onlyfans that in the end goes nowhere, but that is kind of the point in a way. I don’t know. I am bad. I should be more ruthless. But I can’t, I can’t.
A few fun updates, though. So if you only get your news of the world from GMHHAY, I have some late-breaking updates for you:
I was ranting about the Mailchimp sale and how it looked like they might stiff the employees of some sale proceeds, and my Atlanta local friends were telling me that there were rumors it was all gonna get resolved. Well, as I was editing that part, I pinged the ATL friends and yes, it did in fact get resolved, and Mailchimp did right by its employees and set aside a bunch of money and everything turned out all right in the end.
Onlyfans is fine, their credit card processors seem to have given up completely and there are still tons of people gettin’ nekkid at home each day for $10 a month. Breathe easy.
Just yesterday, as I was doing an edit on the exact same topic, the less-prolific former member of the Wrens finally called a spade a spade and acknowledged he wasn’t really into making music anymore, was probably never going to finish the album he had been working on. So that other guy in the Wrens who gave up and started a new band probably made the right call. It is all very sad. Sure was weird to have that saga come to a conclusion four years later just as I was doing an edit on that topic, though.
Apple never did try and foist that scan-all-your-photos-on-your-phone shit on us again, after they pulled back and said they would re-visit it. They realized the problems were real and let that one drop, so I suppose I should acknowledge that and chalk that up as a good thing.
I mustered up a lot of outrage on the OnlyFans, Mailchip and Apple CSAM debacles, and in the end, every single one of them turned out fine. Lesson learned. But this is also why I restored so much of this to the volume? Like.. I dunno, if I only left the stuff I got outraged about that it turned out the outrage was warranted… well, first, I would look smarter than I am, and second, the world would look more bleak than it is, and lord knows we don’t need that right now. A few reminders that sometimes things turn out okay is good.
I sure was right about my continuing paranoia about Trump, though. In hindsight it is crazy how basically through the entire Biden administration I was still traumatized and terrified by Trump and look it all happened exactly as badly as I feared, or even worse. Lovely jubbley.
Oh and 2021 was the year I totally fucked up my leg in that freak stroller accident. I had forgotten about that. MAN my leg was messed up. You will be happy to know it is fine, almost no lingering effects (though my right groin muscles are definitely noticeably more stretched and limber than the left, to this day). Hopefully the same happens with this stinging finger.
Jane’s still loving school but the honeymoon of happiness has ended for Emma and I, and she was back to screaming at mommy and not doing teeth and all that last night, so that is sad. I tried to talk about it this morning. It took forever and I never got a reason out of her, but she did acknowledge she probably shouldn’t have handled the situation that way. Emma and I are kind of thinking that at the moment, Jane seems to brush her teeth on her own in the morning, that we just sort of let go about the evening for a while, hope she steps up and does it herself. Fingers crossed.
Another thing that I discovered while doing the edits is this amazing playlist from almost exactly four years ago, from August 2021, called ‘Someone else’s 1997 Vibe,” about music from 1997 that I was totally too-cool for at the time but, in fact, turns out to rip. It is still really good, so I am giving it to you again four years later. This is what GMHHAY has become. A recycling machine.
Okay byeeeee.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.